You’ve probably seen Boyz in the Hood and 8 Mile, and you might have seen Kidulthood and Menace II Society. They’re all ‘hood’ films. Each of them features young men growing up in ‘the hood’, trying to make it despite all the bad influences around them. La Yuma is another ‘hood’ film, but what makes it different is that instead of starring a young man dealing with machismo, gangsters, and bad parents, it stars a young woman dealing with the same things. Introducing our star (and aspiring boxer): La Yuma.
Witnesses follows a group of brothers who have returned from the front lines of the Croatian-Serbian War as broken men. Their thirst for revenge fuels a late night attack on a Serbian neighbor. Rumors of witnesses pushes them to solemnly work to eliminate all of them. However, stuck in a bleak city on lockdown in a narrative that keeps replaying the past indicates that their fate is unavoidable.
It feels like the three brothers are doomed right from the start when they murder their Serbian neighbor. As they drive towards his house crammed into a small car, they’re completely silent and lifeless. Their lack of emotion makes it feel like their condemned to act instead of acting willingly. After the murder, they appear solemnly sat around the table in their mother’s house in silence. Their mother is dressed black in mourning, and their father is lying next door in an open coffin. An empty bar is the only other place the brothers are pictured, sipping on pints of beer in silence. It feels like they’ve already resigned themselves to their fate and are simply waiting for it to catch up with them.
Their hopelessness is also imbued into the setting. The skies are constantly overcast which shrouds everything underneath them in a bleak palette of greys. The lack of light makes the brothers faces appear more ghostly and pale, in contrast to the more vibrant colors of their flashbacks on the front lines of the war in a time before they’d lost hope. Now, with trauma from the war and having murdered a neighbor, their pale faces are a mark of the life that has left them. They’re sleepwalking like zombies towards their fate.
The narrative structure also serves to construct the prison of trauma they’re stuck in. Following the murder, they’re never given the same freedom as in the opening scene where the camera follows them around the town in their car in one shot. As the film moves on, the same scenes start replaying: scenes of the three brothers in the bar, scenes of the three brothers around the table by their dead dad, and scenes of the three brothers at funerals. Repeatedly showing the brothers in the same places traps them within a limited area. Furthermore, the scenes are all shot with still cameras that don’t move, mimicking their guilt by trapping them within the frame. Even though they haven’t been found guilty, the way the cyclical narrative and fixed cameras become their prison. They’re stuck within the deserted town to be consumed by their guilt and trauma from the war.
The bleak setting, emotionless characters, and cyclical narrative imbues hopelessness into the look and tone of Witnesses, turning it into a gloomy but effective film about the futility of war and hate, and the grief and trauma it causes.
What to Watch Next
If you’re looking for more bleak portrayals of the Balkan Wars, I strongly recommend watching:
The Load: A road trip movie following one Serbian man’s truck journey from Kosovo to Belgrade. It’s also his journey to becoming aware of the grim reality of the war.
Shok: A short film that depicts the brutal occupation of Kosovo.
Or if you’d rather watch more bleak films featuring characters blindly moving forward in divided countries check out Mozambique’s Sleepwalking Landor Rwanda’s The Mercy of the Jungle.
If you think the healthcare system in the U.S. is bad, watch this film to learn about the health crisis in Venezuela. In It’s All Good you’ll meet two patients, an activist medicine smuggler, a doctor in training, and a pharmacist trying to stay afloat. They’re all trying to survive in a country where there is no medicine.
Too Early, Too Late isn’t your typical documentary. Instead of following a person, animal, or political movement, it documents the landscape through a series of long sweeping shots of fields, land, and people. If you’re a people watcher, or someone who likes to sit on a park bench and contemplate the view, you’ll enjoy Too Early, Too Late. It requires patience, an open mind, and some open ears.
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